


Instead, He Chose to Kiss Her

by Somebodys_Nightmare



Series: Anxious Hearts Beneath the Sparkle [1]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: A Little Fall of Rain, Childhood Friends, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Gentle Kissing, Kissing, Light Angst, Love, Making Out, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:21:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26616625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Somebodys_Nightmare/pseuds/Somebodys_Nightmare
Summary: The world may be crashing around them, and his mind may have been a broken and addled disaster, dim and dark and shattered with pain and ugly visions.  But as he stared at her in the waning rain and the faint glow of the mako reactors that lie miles away in their wake, he realized that she was oxygen, and he was dying to breathe.
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart & Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockhart/Cloud Strife
Series: Anxious Hearts Beneath the Sparkle [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2003926
Comments: 37
Kudos: 168
Collections: Cloud and Tifa





	Instead, He Chose to Kiss Her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spaceOdementia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceOdementia/gifts).



> This is just a quick oneshot I was compelled to write after seeing the new, beautiful piece of art by the amazing @sreliata, you can find it [here.](https://twitter.com/Sreliata/status/1307770424298795012?s=20)
> 
> Also I like giving gifts to my friends <3 
> 
> Hope you enjoy.

**Instead, He Chose to Kiss Her**

_The way you feel when you kiss him for the first time._

_Like fire within your bones._

_Like your soul has returned to the water._

_Like every part of you that came from a dead star is alive again._

_-Nikita Gill_

—

“It’s so cold out here,” she was whispering quietly as she followed him into the thicket of trees, deep into the forest beyond Midgar, just beyond the ugly, dim rim of the Wastelands, where the production of mako energy had sucked all of the life right out of the ground. In the distance, they could still make out the glittering pale white and neon green glows of the city’s light pollution, brightening the night sky and deadening the twinkle of the stars above.

Cloud stopped and turned to her, finding her with her arms wrapped tight around her upper half, and as soon as his gaze fell on her, her entire body shook with an involuntary tremble. It caused him to start, his fist clenching at his side, the leather complaining against the metal of his bracer, his steel gauntlet clinking. She wasn’t looking at him; her face was downcast, and shadows that weren’t coming from the sky were darkening her beauty. She gave a little sniff, and Cloud almost went to her.

They’d been walking in a slow hike through the light rain away from Midgar, after climbing down a service ladder at the Expressway’s edge on the plate until they came to the city’s gates. Their group had been somber ever since that last battle that seemed to splinter time and space - and with the exception of Barret’s occasional complaints along the way, they had fallen mostly silent. Several times during their travels, Cloud had turned back to Tifa, finding that she had fallen in step with Aerith, whose eyes had transformed into glassy dark emeralds following the fight. The Cetra seemed shaken by not only their skirmish against Sephiroth, but by something hidden that only she could see, haunting her as they stepped farther and farther away from the city, the sky opening up gray and purple and pale pink above them. The last seventy-two hours had worn all of them down to their bones, between their raid on the Sector5 reactor, the destruction of the Sector7 plate, and their rescue mission in the Shinra Tower. All of it had ended with an otherworldly battle on the lip of the highway, the sky split open along with the rifts of time, darkening and filtered by streaks of lightning, eviscerated by the broken and floating pieces of the world around them.

Rain was still falling in gentle titters from above, died down to a tranquil drizzle that left a light, cool sheen on his skin, staining his sweater but not heavy enough to leak through. Tifa was standing behind him, a few paces away, and Midgar’s glow was still so bright, even miles away in the distance, that it was highlighting the shimmering white streaks in her hair and illuminating the raindrops that had bled into her skin. She had followed Cloud deeper into the forest, even when the others had broken off and fell away near a clearing in the wood. He wasn’t sure why he had continued to walk when they could have easily settled by the line of pine trees and set up camp, right where Barret had groaned roughly before dropping his rucksack on the ground as if to declare that he wasn’t going to take another single step.

The rain had crested in droplets on the smooth skin of her arms, glowing faintly in the light pollution from afar, and his eyes were drawn to the way they shook and skid down her flesh when her body released another tremor. When he stopped to face her, her eyes drifted up to meet his, and he found himself crashing into her dark red depths, finding them sad and placid, calm but troubled seas of blood.

His heart began to pick up its steady timbre as she looked at him, catching something like hope begin to spill over into her gaze. Her hands were at her sides, and he saw them flex and clench, as if desperate to find something for purchase to grab and hold onto. The wind picked up, kicking up her hair in a swirl, and the breeze went straight through his flesh and breached his bones.

“Tifa,” he breathed softly when she shivered again, and involuntarily, he found himself taking a step towards her.

Cloud couldn’t avoid the magnetism with which he was drawn to Tifa Lockhart. Ever since he had first awoken in Midgar with her hovering over him, her eyes bright, ruby gemstones that were brimmed over with worry, he had been sucked into the whirlwind of her entire presence - to her shampoo that clung to her hair and the pale, smooth flesh that was wrapped around her slender, muscular curves, to the full pout of her lips when she smiled at him and the way her fingertips seared his skin whenever she would grace him with a gentle, hesitant touch to the arm. She was a calming force that leveled him whenever he was unsteady, that grounded him when he was floating away untethered. She was a pillar that propped him up, a beam that supported him, and if she broke, he knew he would fall flat to his face. 

Over the course of these last few days and weeks, he was beginning to realize that she was the closest he might ever come to home. The memories of her that were stored somewhere deep in the foggy, darkened recesses of his mind were slowly reawakened by subtle triggers - the glow of a lamp or the brush of her fingers on his skin, the whirring blades of a mechanical fan or the soft cadence of her laugh on the rare occasions that she would emit one. One by one, while other parts of his past remained shadowed and locked away somewhere he still could not access, the picture of her and what she had once meant to him was beginning to take shape, the heavy dark roots of her burrowing into his brain and threading down into his heart.

Every sound she made was beautiful, beautiful like her heart-shaped face, beautiful like her dark crimson eyes, beautiful like the hair that spilled black like tar around her shoulders, and beautiful like the long, endlessly winding curves of her body. Every structure and material that crafted her was beautiful to him, and filled him with wonderment and longing, making his body ache to be nearer to hers, and he had to actively search for distractions that would help him tear himself away from the trance she was ceaselessly pulling him into just by existing.

He had come to pause in front of a tall weeping willow, its wispy, dark green branches and leaves weighed down from the rainfall, and Tifa stopped a few paces away, looking at him expectantly. He realized that she always relied on him to be the leader, even when the others lost focus or dropped away into their own ruminations. She was waiting for him to make the next move, to settle on the campsite for the night and make a decision about their next plan of action.

Cloud didn’t want to think about any of that as he stared at her, watching another raindrop slide down the side of her face. All he could think about was her standing in front of him, cold and wet, exhaustion rippling across her face and her body as she trembled and balled her fists in front of her.

“We should have stopped at an inn,” he told her, dropping his rucksack to the ground. In it was nothing more than the barest of essentials - the potions and healing items he’d collected along the way, a few errant orbs of materia, a canteen of water. He didn’t even have a tent; he’d lacked the foresight to pick one up before they’d departed for the Shinra Building, not expecting that they would be fleeing the city that very night. Worse yet, Tifa wasn’t carrying anything with her, aside from a few healing items in the pouches of her skirt. “But we’re too far from the next town to try to get there tonight. We’re gonna have to rough it.”

“It’s okay,” Tifa answered him softly, and she looked down at the grass, thick and so tall it almost reached her calves. He noticed her fingertips dance nervously next to her thighs again, and she was looking away from him, glancing around the forest that surrounded them. “I think the others already decided to make camp here, too. We should just suck it up, right?”

She was looking back up at him, a slight sparkle in her eyes as she gave him a smile that was too heavy, too burdened by the sadness and despair that she was trying to hide and shove away, down deep somewhere that he couldn’t see. It made him tense up inside, made his chest feel tight, made him angry that it was so goddamn difficult for him to make her feel better.

“You’re freezing,” he said in response to her, unable to endure the sight of her standing in front of him, quivering under the canopy of the tree’s leaves and the faint glow of the Mako reactors in the distance. The rain had finally ceased, the sky now almost full dark except for those faraway beacons of light, and the shimmer on her wet skin was intoxicating him, distracting him with a confusing blend of desire, a wish to keep her safe and warm and a need to see her smile and move under him in happiness and pleasure.

She shivered again at his words, even as she shook her head and tried to distract herself by looking around as if hunting for a place to make camp. He couldn’t take the sight of her any longer, and he stepped forward, reaching out a hand in her direction.

“Tifa, please,” he said softly to her. “Come here.”

Tifa looked up, fire burning in her eyes when they met his, and the flames instantly consumed him, bursting and flooding him with heat. She opened her mouth to speak, but he could only plead with her with his own royal blue stare, and after a moment, Tifa sighed beneath her breath and closed the gap between them, until she was standing inches away from him. He was instantly reminded of the moment they had shared in Aerith’s garden just the night before, when her hair had smelled of cinder and ash and her skin was lined with sweat and grime when he pressed his face against the crook of her neck, wrapping her small but powerful body tight in his embrace. She had molded and fit against him as if she had been designed solely for him, and even as her body was jostled by sobs, her warmth, the firm press of her sculpted and svelte form against him, had pulled away the threads of anxiety and confusion that had been building for weeks in his mind, until all he was left with was calm in the face of destruction and a deeply embedded need to shelter her from all of it, from everything that had crashed and burned around them. And so he had held onto her, trying to absorb that feeling of peace and serenity from her body as he felt his mind fall back into place amongst itself, until she was gently pulling away from him, his gauntlet digging painful divots into her shoulders.

Now, though, she no longer carried the burnt odor of smoke across her flesh, but rather the distant scent of vanilla and jasmine, lined faintly by the sweat that clung to her skin from their long travels and ceaseless fighting that night, punctuated by the smell of iron from the blood that leaked from scratches and superficial wounds across her flesh. It was a heady and carnal combination, reminding him how deeply impure and roughly they had been living over the course of the last several days. He wondered when was the last time Tifa had even eaten.

She deserved so much better than this.

She deserved to be in a warm bed in a heated room, blankets tucked tight around her while the flicker of flames inside of a fireplace danced across her skin and brought out a flush in her cheeks. She deserved to be able to sleep in late until she was fully rested, and she could awaken and pull her long body into a stretch against the sunlight that would stream in from a window that led to a quiet and peaceful world, a world without pain and trauma. She deserved bubble baths and expensive wine, rich, filling meals and tight embraces, soft words of praise and encouragement and care. She deserved to be held tight and comforted, she deserved to know that she mattered and that she was important.

She deserved to be loved.

Instinctually, impulsively, Cloud reached out to pull Tifa close to him again. He moved tentatively, afraid of his own hands and arms, but unable to let her stand there in the cold any longer. He was frigid and damp too, which was probably not very fucking helpful, and he wished he had a jacket or a blanket to offer her. But all he had was his own flesh and bone, and while he knew that it wasn’t enough, that he would never be enough, he would give her whatever he had to offer and let her consume it until there was nothing left of him to take.

She moved into him immediately, as if she had been waiting for the invitation. The way that she tumbled against his chest felt more natural than anything he could unhook from the dark depths of his memories, aside from maybe the last time he held her like this as she mourned the calamities that chased them and seemed to cling to her step by step everywhere that she went. This time, though, she wasn’t shaking with tears, but rather with chill, and this time, her hands weren’t frustratingly and despairingly gripping at his biceps from the pain that ripped through her heart, but rather had looped around his waist, returning the hug in a way that seemed less about comfort and more about affection. Her cheek came to press against his chest, settling into the damp knit fabric, and her heart began to meld into his as it beat against his torso, freeing him from where he was buried beneath the fog of his own terrified fears and doubts.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized softly as his hands came to wrap around her, holding the small of her back. “I don’t even have a tent or a blanket.” As if to highlight the cataclysm of this, he brushed one hand along her arm, shaking away the film of rainwater that had seeped into her skin.

“It’s okay, Cloud. You’re warm.”

“Not warm enough. You’re freezing,” he told her again, terrified that she might get sick.

She pulled back slightly to look up at him, and he realized again, just as he had that night in the garden, how her body fit against his, line by line, inch by inch. Feeling her so close to him again, her breasts soft but firm pillows against his chest, her heartbeat echoing and thundering against his, threatening to collide into his so that they could become one, had him tightening his hold around her, and this time, she didn’t complain about the harshness or the pain of his grip on her. She leaned in even further, pressing her body against his as if she couldn’t get close enough, and part of his brain scrambled as he tried to process her response to him.

“As long as I have you, I’ll be okay,” she responded, her voice muffling against his sweater. “You’re enough.”

Her words reverberated through the cavity of his chest, settling somewhere inside of him, setting off an airstrike of electricity inside of his nerves. So much had happened in the few short days that he was able to assemble his memory around, and he had responded to everything with instinct and gut reactions, striving to just survive until the next crisis hit. Yet Tifa was the one constant in his life that he did not treat with that level of unexpected and quickly constructed counteraction. Tifa, he was sure enough to plan for, to think confidently about. Tifa was the only person still in his life who truly mattered, whose opinion he valued, and because of that, everything he did, every thought that crossed his mind, every decision he made, was anchored to her reality. She was the eye of his storm, the apex of his mountain, the single star in the center of his galaxy. 

As they drifted further away from Midgar and deeper into the maelstrom of conflict that was brewing between Shinra and Sephiroth, Cloud slowly began to realize that there was nothing more important than the moments that he shared with her, skin to skin, heart to heart, creating the only moments when the fog in his mind began to dissipate, and clarity began to shine through his soul like sunlight through wide-open bay windows on a clear summer day. Only when he was close to Tifa like this, sharing a vulnerable space with her where they were connected, did he feel like he could pull through the confusing haze.

He lifted his hands from her lower back to rub her arms, trying to inspire fresh warmth in her body. The sound she made at his touch, even under the rough leather of his gloves, sent a spark of bliss through his brain. He had heard Tifa make all kinds of sounds - he’d heard her whisper and scold, heard her scoff and giggle, heard her worried gasps and throaty, heavy breaths of uncertainty. He’d heard the gentle cadence of her voice when she spoke to him in the private confines of his room at midnight, heard her wild and unbridled battle cries that would pierce the air around them during combat. But he’d never heard her moan like this before, a sound that was needy and seeking, timed perfectly with the way she pressed into him, causing his body to tense again as he squeezed her upper arms to stir her blood, before he slowly lowered them to rest just above her elbows.

Tifa lifted her head from his chest then, leaning back to look up at him, and her eyes had softened and darkened into murky, cabernet pools, shining with the lights of Midgar behind them, illuminating the refracting darts of blood that pierced her stare. The vivid scarlet and vermillion that swirled in her irises under her lashes, now dark and wavering under her heavy-lidded gaze, was pulling his heart further and further away from his center, threatening to tear it out of his body to make it hers for the keeping.

Cloud considered how he could have reacted at that moment as she stared up at him, her eyes begging him for something he was almost sure he could never give her. He could have let go of her arms, focusing his energy on rummaging through his rucksack for at least one useful item that could help them make a decent shelter for the night. He could have gently pulled her away, insisting that they find a suitable patch of grass to make camp for the night so that they could get enough sleep, however damp and uncomfortable it might be there in the woods, so that they could face the challenges that the next day and the days thereafter carried for them. He could have taken her wrist and pulled her back through the thicket to Aerith and Barret and Red, insisting that they all huddle around a fire together and get a quick few hours of sleep before daybreak.

Instead, he chose to kiss her.

He moved without thinking, as if he had never been so sure of anything in his life, as if his mind and his heart and every nerve in his body had been planning and preparing for this moment for all of eternity, his mind so clear that he knew there was no other decision he could ever make about anything that would ever feel as right as this. 

The world may be crashing around them, and his mind may have been a broken and addled disaster, dim and dark and shattered with pain and ugly visions. But as he stared at her in the waning rain and the faint glow of the mako reactors that lie miles away in their wake, he realized that she was oxygen, and he was dying to breathe.

His hands slid away from her arms, one securing itself in a wide splay across her upper back, pinning her against him, the other tangling into the dark spill of her hair that hung behind her, his fingers wrapping in its threads. He leaned over her, just enough that she tipped back slightly, and her eyes widened in realization as his face moved closer to hers, his tongue dipping between his lips. He saw her lashes flutter and close just as he pressed his mouth against hers in a gentle, closed-mouth kiss.

Her reaction was instant; she was pressing her hips and her chest into his, and she dragged her arms away from where they’d occupied a hug around his waist to loop around his neck, her wrists crossing over one another as she hung off of him. He groaned as he felt her entire body slacken in surrender to his, gently rocking against him, thrusting her pelvis against his as she lifted up on her toes. His mind began to so badly spin with electrifying desire and the satisfying, fulfilling sensation of being needed, of being wanted back, that his arm around her back crushed her against him with even greater pressure and force, until she mewled another sweet sound he had never once heard her make before, and his body grew hot, forgetting the chill of the rainy night they had suffered through.

She made another sound, this one a moan that seemed to be pleading, and he felt her tongue swipe across his bottom lip, causing his vision to white out behind his eyes. Her mouth was so warm and pillowy soft that he was afraid to lift his away from it or to even breach its confines, content to just lay against her downy heat. But she was eager for more, and her urgency galvanized him, inspiring him to slip his tongue inside of her mouth, greeting hers instantly as her jaw relented and her mouth opened to him.

The sparks burned him instantly, singeing the synapses of his brain and brightening the corners of his eyes with searing white spots. She welcomed him into her mouth, her tongue dancing with his, and the sensation was so vivid and foreign and real that he felt pulled under, losing himself in her enveloping haze. He held her even tighter against him as they gently rocked in place, and her hands, still around his neck, came up to find his hair. As she curled the tips of her fingers in an electrifying dance across his scalp, his only response was to grow more urgent and frenzied, now sucking at her tongue with his lips, pulling at her bottom lip with his teeth, running his tongue across her swollen, pink flesh. Demure at first, Tifa began to fall in step with the cavorting of his mouth, biting back at him and then backing away before luring him back in, twisting her tongue around his and searching the inside of his mouth as if it held every answer in the universe and she had to uncover them all. Cloud’s brain quickly began to scramble and mist over again, but it was not the confusing, painstaking fog he had been living in since he came to Midgar. It was the gratifying disorientation of absolute pleasure and complete adoration, found in the arms of a woman whom he had loved since she was a child, whose heart had always held his, even though she had always been and would always be too good for him. It was fucking scandalous that he was allowed to have this moment, a hazy dream of desire and openness that flared with the colors of the rainbow and the heat of the sun. He groaned against her lips, cherishing her, relishing in the feel of her that was soft and warm and wet and stabilizing, and he vowed to never let her go, to do whatever was in his power to hold onto this moment and to her forever. His hand in her hair tangled further and pulled on it gently, as if to act on his thoughts.

Eventually, they had to come up for air, and they slowly broke apart, though it was heartbreaking and shattering the moment their lips no longer touched. She keened, a new sound that sent missiles of hot desire through his nerves, and although their lips ceased to touch, the noise she produced spurred him to press her body even tighter against his, if that were somehow possible. He opened his eyes to find hers still closed, and then they were slowly widening, still heavy-lidded and shielding her pupils which had begun to dilate with pleasure.

He realized, slowly, as she looked up at him and her crimson irises connected with his cerulean blue, that there were tears at the corners of her eyes.

“Cloud…” she whispered, completely breathless, and he realized that she was trembling in his hold. He dropped his fistful of her hair and made sure that both arms were wrapped around her tight, securing her to him.

“Tifa…” he rejoined softly, surprised by the gravel in his voice. His mind began to race as he tried to find the words to respond, to address what was happening, and he found the threat of paranoid darkness gripping his mind at its edges again. “I don’t - I-“

“Shh,” she murmured, tipping her head forward to his chest again. The fingers of both of her hands were still in his hair, but they had drifted to the nape of his neck, pulling at the threads there, stroking him gently as if he were a kitten beneath her adoring touch, and he nearly purred. “It’s okay, Cloud. I’ve only been waiting for that since I was thirteen.”

“What?” Cloud was awestruck, and he pulled away slightly, but her face was still buried against his chest, refusing to look up at him. He started to back up a little, but she whined a protest.

“Please,” she whimpered. “My legs are going to give out.”

Cloud’s brain was misfiring because he couldn’t believe that one long kiss from him had put Tifa fucking Lockhart out of commission, much less could he believe she had wanted to kiss him for almost as long as he dreamed about kissing her. Awash with this realization, Cloud only nodded at her sentiment, bending at the knee so that he could scoop one arm under her thighs while the other remained secure across her back. He lifted her up to his chest, and she tightened her hold around his neck as if she was afraid she might tumble.

“I won’t drop you,” he promised her, and he slowly began to step back toward the willow tree that was behind him. When his back reached it, he carefully slid down to crouch and sit in front of it, spreading his knees and folding one leg below him as he lowered Tifa into his lap. She kept her body pressed against his as he settled, clutching him as if she were afraid she might float away from him if she let go. Now that they there were secured against the cool, damp earth, Cloud wrapped both arms around her tight, until she was completely cradled in his embrace.

“Are you okay?” he asked her after a moment, his heart thundering at their closeness. He had never been this close to anyone before, could not ever remember falling into an embrace that was as intimate as this. Every inch of her body was warm and forgiving against his, melding into him as if she were becoming a part of him. The night was quiet, and again, the sound of her heartbeat began to fall in step with his own as she breathed carefully beneath him. He soon found his head spinning as he realized that his enhanced senses were heightening his complete awareness of her, to the point that he could hear her blood rush in her veins, could detect the vacillations of her ventricles as they transferred fresh blood from her heart to her brain and back again in an endless loop of life. The realization of it was both awe-inspiring and terrifying, and he pulled her even closer into his embrace, squeezing her to transfer more warmth into her body, wondering how long his luck would last, before she would finally push away in recognition of how close they had grown and reject him.

“I’m better than okay,” she told him, and his eyes widened as the opposite of his fears unfolded in front of him. She was tugging on his neck, urging him to draw nearer to her. Her pupils were blown open wide, set against the backdrop of murky shiraz that twinkled with sparkles of crimson, glassy and still wet, pleading with him. “Please, kiss me some more.”

Cloud’s heart leaped and somersaulted inside of his chest like a dolphin, and he was almost certain it was climbing through his throat to flop out of his chest and make its way to her where it belonged. His brain tore through a dizzying, unintelligible maze as he tried to decipher the look of pure longing that lived across her face, as he tried to imagine and make sense of the fact that she was saying with words that she wanted him. It was as if the gods had opened the sky and showed him that heaven was real, making him a true believer right at that very spot that he sat.

He leaned in to oblige her, but he couldn’t stop one hand from coming up to touch her cheek softly, enraptured by her beauty that was at once serene and sharp, angelic and bewitching. His eyes were locked with hers as he drank her in, drawing a faint blush that crested the tops of her cheeks and instantly made his entire body warm.

“Have you kissed anyone before?” he couldn’t stop himself from asking, and as soon as the words left his lips, he regretted them, knowing that he wouldn’t like the answer. Her cheeks brightened and flushed even further, and she tore her eyes away from his, looking down at her lap.

“No,” she whispered, her voice suddenly very low, and Cloud’s eyes widened in incredulity.

“Really?” he repeated, and his voice cracked, leaving him to blush right alongside her. He knew that Tifa wouldn’t lie to him, at least he hoped that she wouldn’t, especially not about something like this, but he found it almost impossible to believe that a young woman who looked the way that she did had had never been kissed.

“I know, it’s embarrassing, but…” her voice trailed off, and she refused to look back up at him. “…I never liked anyone enough to do that before.”

Cloud stopped breathing, the implications of her words slamming into him with the force of a tsunami until his chest began to hurt. He started down at her, his heart now resounding like the thundering storm surge that preceded a hurricane. She was still looking away from him.

His tongue was thick in his mouth, choking him, and yet he felt the words break free, desperate now to confirm something, anything, to let him know he was not imagining or dreaming what the fuck he was hearing. “Does that mean… you like me?”

Tifa finally looked back up at him, and her eyes sparkled like rubies as her lips drew up into a tiny smile. “Of course I like you, silly. I wouldn’t kiss you if I didn’t.”

Cloud’s heart really was about to leave his chest. He swallowed carefully, the disbelief beginning to dispel itself but still there and still raw. But he flung it away, lowering his face towards hers to finally give her the kiss she had asked for.

She slid her hand away from his neck and stopped him in his tracks by pressing a finger against his lips, her smile now sliding away into a teasing simper.

“Not so fast,” she razzed. “Your turn.”

“What?” he said stupidly.

Tifa just held her playful smirk at him. He could feel her settle in even more comfortably in the center of his lap, as if it were as comforting and snug as her very own bed. “Have you ever been kissed?”

Cloud almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea, but instead, his own cheeks began to brighten with embarrassment. She stared at him for a moment, and he watched as the goading look on her face began to slide away into seriousness as she waited for him to answer. After a moment, she looked genuinely concerned, and Cloud finally smiled at her, even though his face was still hot.

“Yeah,” he answered, and he watched as her eyes grew wide and then faltered with disappointment. He leaned in close to her again, bringing one gloved hand to her chin to grip it gently and turn her face to his. “About a minute and a half ago.”

He saw the cardinal specks of color flicker and burst against her irises, and her mouth dropped open slightly to respond. But before she could speak, Cloud took advantage of her separated lips to slot his own mouth over hers, pulling her in for the kiss she had asked him for, joining them together in a new dance of intimacy and desperate closeness and warmth.

This time, Cloud savored her as she wrapped her arms around his neck and relaxed into his lap and the protective cradle he had wrapped around her, her back settling against his leg and her legs folded over his opposite knee but still curled close to his body. She made that pleasant mewling sound again, a cross between a moan and a whimper, a sound that screamed her conjoined need and want for him at the same moment that she pushed her tongue up and across his with a hard, desperate swipe, setting off a fireworks display of bright colors inside of his brain. His arms held her tighter; their embrace could not have brought them any closer without defying physics and melding their flesh and blood and bone together and alchemizing them into a single person.

This time, the kiss was languid, the slow dance at prom night rather than the jostling back and forth of a waltz. They took their time exploring each other, their attachment to one another growing into the night, unable to pull their lips from one another’s except for brief moments to gasp and hiccup for oxygen. Cloud relished in the sweet undertones that flavored the heat of Tifa’s mouth, learning every shape and contour of her small, pink tongue, memorizing the soft ridges that lived in her top and bottom lips, testing the lines of her teeth and the caverns of her inner cheeks and the underside of her tongue. Tifa began to show a newfound love for sucking, pulling his tongue and lips between hers, occasionally throttling his flesh with her teeth until he was emitting surprisingly vocal moans of his own back in beams at her. She nipped at him, rubbing her nose across his, and he leaned in and nibbled her back, bumping his forehead against hers. 

It took everything in his power to keep his hips from thrusting and grinding into her. He wanted to remain respectful, for she deserved nothing less than the best he could summon for her, and he was not about to test his luck and the blessings the gods had been so kind to bestow upon him that night.

Eventually, they broke apart, and Cloud was amazed by how much saliva they had shared, how long their lips had been melded as they explored each other’s mouths. Tifa’s face was bright red again, the tops of her cheeks fully flushed, and he noticed that her soft breasts were rising and falling in a steady, swift succession, signaling how out of breath she was. 

“I want to go to an inn,” she suddenly whined up at him, her eyes glassy with tears again. He realized then, with a sudden shock of pain at the back of his neck, that she was pulling at the hair there with her fingers, still entwined in his golden threads. He could feel her body tighten and coil in his lap, and he realized then that she was really, really worked up, maybe even as badly as he was, and she was struggling much more than he was to contain it.

His heart fell and shattered on the ground as he looked into her eyes, at the way her beautiful face shone back up at him, waiting and expecting him to care for her. It was all he ever wanted to do, he had promised that he would be there for her, and he would, in any way that she needed. And that meant protecting her no matter what the circumstances or the cost.

He ran one hand over her arm to soothe her, trying to rub her tension away, and she expelled another sensual sound, this one much huskier than he had grown familiar with, and it caused him to squeeze her tight. He looked back at her, bringing his hand up to her cheek and letting his fingers drift and linger under her eyes, waiting to catch the tears that were threatening to spill forth.

“I know,” he responded in a quiet, low voice, heartbroken that he couldn’t give her what she wanted right then and there. “We will tomorrow. As soon as we reach Kalm, I promise that the first thing we will do is go straight to the inn. We’ll get hot showers and hot food and as many hours of sleep as you need before we figure out what to do next.”

Tifa didn’t respond, just burrowed her neck into his chest, purring slightly against him so that he could feel the vibrations the sound made in her body.

“We just can’t move tonight, Teef,” he went on. “We’ll be safe here until daybreak. Just go to sleep, okay? I’ve got you. I won’t let anything happen to you while you rest.”

Cloud began to breathe as deeply as he could, his chest rising and falling with her atop it, again and again, until he could hear the calming rhythm of her heartbeat beam up into his body, could detect the rushing rapids of her bloodstream as it pumped blood throughout her veins. After a long, fitful moment, he felt Tifa begin to relax against him again, disrupting the coil, and she held onto him even more tightly, trusting in him completely as her body fell limp into sleep, cradled in the safety of his lap and arms.

When he knew that she was knocked out, he let his head fall back against the tree’s trunk, and though his body relaxed so that he could fall into an easy, light sleep that he could easily rouse from if he even sensed an enemy or danger in the vicinity, he kept his arms secure and tight around Tifa, desperate to not let her lose any of the warmth their huddled bodies had conjured.

Now that he had tasted her lips, Cloud knew that he would never be able to continue living without the sweetness that was Tifa Lockhart available for his endless consumption. He could never live without being able to put his lips on hers at all hours of the day and night. Kissing her was the most perfect beauty of life that he had ever discovered, and he knew he would be happy to kiss her for the rest of eternity, that he would be happy to die with her lips against his.

As his eyes slowly fell heavy-lidded, Cloud wondered if the rest of Tifa tasted as lovely as her lips did. There was only one way to find out, and Cloud resolved that by this time tomorrow, he would know just what it was like to kiss every part of her.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! :) I always love to read your thoughts so feel free to leave me a note 💜💫
> 
> Please visit me on twitter @nitezintodreamz


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